Recently, former Canadian media mogul Conrad Black was released from a Florida prison after serving less than three years of a seven year sentence. Expressing opinions on Black has long been a preoccupation for members of the Canadian media. In the past few years, Black has been labelled everything from a malicious robber baron to a tragic hero, plagued chiefly by his own hubris.Continue...

In an impassioned speech delivered July 20, Assembly of First Nations head Shawn Atleo insisted that the time has come for the aboriginal community to take an active role in determining its status within Canada.Continue...

Nearly ten years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the impending construction of a mosque threatens to ignite discrimination and religious intolerance in America. The planned location of the mosque—only a few blocks from ground zero, the former site of the World Trade Center — has some up in arms, claiming that a Muslim site of worship has no place near one of the most hallowed sites in America.Continue...

As citizen journalism and blogging mature and become competing forces for readership, newspapers are racing to be first to report. The problem with being first is that first can also be wrong, or at least wrong by omission.Continue...

One company wants to make the easy task of finding pornography online a little easier. ICM Registry has submitted an application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to register the domain name “.xxx.” Websites registered under this domain would end in .xxx, as opposed to .com, .ca or other common suffixes.Continue...

The security measures in place to protect the delegates at the G20 summit are substantial. While many criticize these security measures as excessive—the six-kilometre fence alone cost more than five million dollars—the most unsettling defence deployed for the summit is one which has received far less public attention.Continue...

Being nice is underrated. No one wants to hire nice, to date nice, to be friends with nice. Everyone wants edgy, smart, talented–I admit, I’m guilty of it too but what’s wrong with nice? It wouldn’t really be a problem if we expected nice plus clever, beautiful, etc., but the truth is, nice is so uncool it’s actually undesirable.Continue...

Stephen Harper’s stance on foreign aid threatens to re-open a debate that has been uneasily settled in Canada for more than twenty years. In 2009, Prime Minister Harper announced that child and maternal health programs in developing countries are to be a major focus at the upcoming G8 summit in June.Continue...

On April 21, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social networking site’s latest gimmick, one which allows Facebook to engage with a user’s internet activity outside Facebook’s homepage. Websites that have partnered with Facebook can greet visitors with personalized content.Continue...

Last week, I read about an impossible feat. The Globe and Mail interviewed Sean Aiken, the author of One-Week Job. Aiken, a business school graduate, wrote about his experiences working 52 jobs in 52 weeks—one job for every week of the year.Continue...

Last week, one of my professors took the first five minutes of class to gauge students’ opinions on the proposed changes to the English department’s curriculum. An hour later the class was still talking, and had opened up to a larger discussion about Queen’s academic future.Continue...

On Tuesday, the National Post published an article about the AMS’s decision to cancel a Food Bank fundraiser called the “SUMO Showdown” that would have made use of two sumo wrestling suits.

The suits, oversized plastic costumes designed to mimic the ancient Japanese sport of sumo wrestling, are yellow-tinted and include helmets with structures resembling black buns of hair on top.Continue...

Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi cancelled its prom after the administration learned student Constance McMillen wanted to bring a female date and wear a tuxedo, BBC News reported March 23.Continue...

Last Thursday in the Queen’s Centre a small group of students made an alternative fashion statement with “Rogue,” a fun and fearless show designed to challenge mainstream norms of body image and gender identity, among others.Continue...

The newspaper’s gradual shift toward web-based content has some huge implications, the largest of which is that news coverage has become a two-way street.

Instead of reading a news story and then putting the paper down to sip their coffee, people can react immediately by posting comments online in response to the story or to other people’s comments.Continue...

Joannie Rochette, the Canadian figure skater who won a bronze medal at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games just days after her mother’s sudden death, was on thin ice earlier this week, the Toronto Star reported March 16.Continue...

A Liberal Member of Parliament is proposing a new private member’s bill that would require the five highest-paid executives of registered Canadian charities to publicly disclose their salaries, the Globe and Mail reported March 16.Continue...